Who says soccer can't do player comps?
Well, no one. But we also rarely do it. Yes, there's an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to the "New Diego Maradona." But that's really just a list of the best Argentine soccer players who were younger than Maradona. And so went the search for the next Lionel Messi. Pretty much every country has had their own Messi at this point; Canada, the United States, and Mexico have already had multiple Messis. These comparisons, of course, never went much further than "kind of short and very good at soccer."
This is different from what we do with the major American sports. For the NFL and NBA drafts each year, player comps are the currency. At The Ringer, my former colleague Danny Kelly spins out classics every year for the NFL draft. This season, he has compared Boise State running back Ashton Jeanty to a "Battlebot Minotaur" and No. 1 overall prospect Travis Hunter to "Deion Sanders" even though Sanders' own son is also in the draft. In the NBA, the website NBADraft.net once infamously compared Deshawn Stevenson, who went on to average 7.2 points per game as a pro, to Michael Jordan.
The beauty of these comps -- when they're not wide of the mark -- is that they serve as a fertile shorthand. If you've watched football before, and I compare a prospect to Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen, you immediately know he's large, fast, borderline-reckless, and could throw a ball across the Great Wall of China.
Although soccer doesn't have a draft -- and although prospects are becoming relied-upon pros at increasingly younger ages -- I think player comps can still be A) useful, and more importantly B) fun. So, I've pulled the top 10 most valuable under-21 players from the site Transfermarkt and come up with my own comps for each one.
Lamine Yamal, 17, winger, Barcelona
Player comp: Lionel Messi, if he never needed growth hormones